Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Naming Your Comic Site

When you're building a web site for a new comic or collective, you will be naming pages and assigning title tags that may be with you for years. What words should you use?
Look at the comparative search volume for these terms:
  • comic: 3.35 million
  • webcomic: 74,000
  • comics online: 50,000
  • online comic: 40,000
  • webcomics: too little to measure
  • web comic: 15,000
If I were you, I'd name my home page Gnomes_Vs_Dinosaurs/comic/home. (Yes, an informant emailed me the name of your strip.)
The puzzler is, this is going to work great for a search on Gnome Comic, but if the search is for Comic, it will be years before you stand a chance of turning up.
That's why I'd consider naming or tagging the comic pages something like Gnomes_Vs_Dinosaurs/webcomic/1. Yes, webcomic instead of comic.
I would also use both words in descriptive and caption text, but in moderation. I'd use variations from the list above randomly for meta tags. You can't trick Google, but you can help it understand.
And you were going to use GvD.net, weren't you? If you could get it, great, but with short URLs almost extinct, descriptive ones are in. Just make sure that you arrange your domains so that typing GnomesVsDinosaurs.com works too.